With 28M users, deviantART gets $10M investment from Autodesk

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deviantART, an online community for artists, has received a fresh coat of $10 million paint from an unexpected source: software provider Autodesk, according to a Wednesday SEC filing.

This round of funding, which began in September, is a steep jump from deviantART’s $3.5 million Series A round back in 2007. deviantART’s PR team declined to comment on how deviantART will specifically use this $10 million heading into 2014 and beyond, but deviantART CEO Angelo Sotira said in a blog post that “we plan to improve deviantART at a faster pace than we could have just under our own steam. More deviantART delivered deviously: that's the plan.”

It’s hard to imagine how much more deviously art could be delivered though: the site already has 27.8 million users, over 250 million pieces of uploaded art and generates over 2.5 billion page views per month.

This large userbase is certainly a match for Autodesk, which has over 145 million users of its own drawing and illustration applications such as Sketchbook and Pixlr. Sotira wrote that he is excited to work with Autodesk because the company’s software has been “helping designers create amazing things” for 30 years and, not to mention, has been used by 18 of the past Academy Award winners for Best Visual Effects.

Although the way Autodesk will benefit from this investment is not quite clear yet, the fact that Autodesk has “all sorts of tools that artists use,” could come into play, Autodesk’s vice president of consumer products Samir Hanna told TechCrunch: “If they choose to use our tools, that’s great, but that is not something that we would be pushing for,” Hanna, who will be joining the deviantART board of directors, said.

Hanna’s addition the board of directors and the flood of funding from Autodesk doesn’t mean the deviantART community will be changing though, Sotira wrote, instead Autodesk’s involvement marks tremendous growth since deviantART’s launch in 2000.

“Our consistent growth as a community and in raw numbers visiting the site proves how vital deviantART has become to so many involved in the arts and in the popular culture reflected and created by deviants,” Sotira wrote. “It takes more than just extra servers to keep up with this growth.”

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